


On Your Side

by bazooka



Category: Sungkyunkwan Scandal
Genre: During Canon, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 17:21:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4313724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bazooka/pseuds/bazooka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a few things that Moon Jae Shin does very, very well. First and foremost of these is getting hurt, but pissing off Gu Yong Ha is a close second.</p><p>Spoilers through episode 14.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Your Side

**Author's Note:**

> In episode 14 Kim Yoon Hee wakes up in Yeorim’s room after they’ve spent the night trying to keep Geol Oh from: a) dying from his wounds; b) being caught by the student president; c) arrested for being a masked vigilante, but they don’t show us what happens after she leaves. This absolutely kills me, because I am ridiculous.
> 
> The next bit of Meridian isn't ready to go up at _all_ so you get this instead. Um. Yes.

When Moon Jae Shin opened his eyes for the second time that morning it was because of a noise - hushed and quiet, a nothing sound just barely this side of audible, the kind of noise followed close behind by a whispered curse and the sound of someone scrambling to amend whatever it was that had gone wrong in the first place.

The first time he'd opened his eyes it had been for no reason at all, just his body pulling him up out of sleep with a hook and line made out of heat and discomfort and pain. Kim Yoon Shik had been at his shoulder, Yeorim had been at his hand, both fast asleep and looking almost as dead as he felt. But when Kim Yoon Shik woke up, pressed one cool hand to his forehead, nodded as though satisfied and then left the room as silently as he could (as quietly as _she_ could) - Jae Shin had briefly considered trying to get up then, trying to sit up and find some water and maybe a change of clothes (something preferably not soaked with a disgusting mixture of blood and sweat) but when he'd tried pushing himself up onto his elbows his vision had tunneled and gone dark and his body had pulled him back down into sleep as a form of self defense.

But when Moon Jae Shin opened his eyes for the second time that morning it was… later. Much later. The sun wasn't shining in low through the paper panes on the door anymore, the air didn't smell like dew anymore, Yeorim wasn't asleep at his hand anymore. Moon Jae Shin opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling and tried to figure out what the noise had been.

"Sorry," came Yeorim's voice somewhere to his left. "I tried to keep it balanced, but..."

"Tried to keep what balanced?" Oh hell, his throat.

"Breakfast," Yeorim said. He leaned over, the look on his face caught somewhere between concern and amusement. "Or lunch, to be more accurate. You look terrible."

Jae Shin closed his eyes and very, very carefully brought one hand up to his face. His head hurt. His eyes hurt. His throat hurt. Even his hair, defying all reason, contrived to hurt. "Thanks."

"Better than you did last night, though. You only bled on my quilt a little. Can you sit up?"

"Yes."

"... Really?"

"I'm sitting up. I’m sitting up right now."

"You're not sitting up. You're just lying on your back getting paler and paler by the second." Yeorim sighed (a deep, put-upon exhalation that rang loud and thick with _the things I put up with, honestly_ ) and scooted close in against Jae Shin's side. "Help me out a little here. Use your elbows."

And then Yeorim was bending down over him, gripping his shoulders, pulling him carefully into a sitting position. Jae Shin's first inclination was to shrug him off. His second inclination was to protest. His third inclination was to push himself up on his own, but he didn't get around to doing any of them because as he moved the nerves in his chest coughed into life and lit up and seared him, so he just folded gently forward into himself and made an embarrassingly high-pitched noise into the blanket.

"You're a _mess,"_ Yong Ha said somewhere over his head, his voice a funny mixture of dismay and derision.

"I'm fine. I'm used to it."

"You’re not fine. You're crying into my blanket. Like a baby."

"I'm not crying."

"Tears are coming out of your eyes. How many more of your bodily fluids are you going to leak onto my bed?" He paused thoughtfully, lips pursing. “Don’t answer that.”

Jae Shin pushed himself upright. Fought back against the white-hot darkness behind his eyes that threatened to pull him back down again. Glared balefully at Yeorim with every ounce of fury he could muster. "I'm _fine,"_ he said again, the words pushed out through clenched teeth.

Yeorim flashed him his sweetest smile and patted him lovingly on the cheek. "That's my tough boy."

Jae Shin knocked his hand away. “Stop it, Yeorim. I’m not -”

"I brought rice and seaweed soup and tea," Yeorim interrupted, pulling his reading desk over next to Jae Shin's sleeping mat, the tray on top filled with dishes and suspiciously sticky. "There was kimchi too, but -" His eyes flickered, and the look on his face went from self-satisfied to mildly embarrassed. "Let's just say you don't want it anymore."

"You dropped it," Jae Shin said flatly. Yong Ha was still wearing the silk purple housecoat he’d had on the night before, only now it was infinitely more wrinkled. (Had he really gone all the way to the kitchens in that? What on earth would possess him to leave his bedroom in broad daylight, his carefully cultivated sophistication left undone? What on earth could possibly be so important?)

Yeorim shrugged. "It was heavy. Just count yourself lucky I didn't drop the soup, too. Can you eat?" He paused briefly. “What am I saying? You’re Geol Oh. You can always eat. Let me rephrase that: do you think you can feed yourself?”

Jae Shin sat hunched over slightly, right hand held tight to the bandaging around the left side of his chest, trying to gauge just how well he’d be able to handle a spoon. His left arm was going to be a little weak for a while (the blade had gone just a tiny bit too deep, nicked the muscle and the tendon enough that he could already tell it was going to be hell pretending not to favor his left side) and as for his right… it probably wasn’t really true, but he felt a little like if he let go of the gash in his chest it would fall open again and bleed out all over Yong Ha’s floor. “Yeah,” he said cautiously. “Yeah, I can -”

Yong Ha clicked his tongue irritably and bent forward, popping the lid off of the metal rice bowl and scooping some out into the soup to make a kind of makeshift porridge. “You’re pathetic. I can’t believe you.”

“I can feed myself, it’s not like -”

“All right, all right,” Yong Ha sighed, holding the spoon up in one hand with the other cupped underneath to catch any wayward drips. “Open your mouth or I’ll pour this down your front and then your wound will get all infected and gross and then you’ll _really_ never find a wife. Because you’ll be _dead.”_

Jae Shin opened his mouth to argue but Yong Ha stuck the spoon between his lips instead. “You’re the worst,” he said, once he’d managed to swallow. “Are you trying to choke me to death?”

“Not yet. Give me a few more years to get sick of you. Open up.”

“I can do it,” Jae Shin growled, wrestling the spoon from Yong Ha’s grip. He got it free from Yong Ha’s fingers and felt victorious for all of two seconds before he felt himself tipping gently backwards. “Oh, shit -”

“The funny thing about core muscles,” Yong Ha grunted in his ear, having bolted forward to catch his weight with his shoulder, “is that when you mess them up it’s really hard to keep your balance. You’re really heavy, you know that?”

“You’re just _weak,”_ Jae Shin bit back, trying to haul himself back upright without popping any stitches. “You don’t have to feed me, stop treating me like some kind of -”

Yong Ha sighed again, that same enormous groan of dismay and resignation, and adjusted so that Jae Shin was between his legs - one foot planted solidly behind Jae Shin’s right hip, right knee up to keep Jae Shin from tipping backward, the other leg curled in and under himself so it was out of the way. He pulled the reading desk in close again and slapped it in a self-satisfied sort of way. “There. Now you can feed yourself and you won’t fall over like a newborn horse.” He flashed Jae Shin a grin, that curling, pleased look that always made Jae Shin want to hit him just a little bit. “Well? Do you want me to keep spoon feeding you, or are you going to -”

“I’m doing it,” Jae Shin sputtered, scrambling to pick the spoon back up off the tray. He let himself fall against Yong Ha’s leg, easing his weight back as carefully as he could. “Did you actually carry this from the kitchens? By yourself?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Have someone bring it to my room? One of the porters from last night, maybe?” He shot Jae Shin a glare and leaned over to grab something off of one of the bookshelves against the wall behind Jae Shin’s back. “Why don’t we just put up a big sign letting everybody and their mother know that you’re the Red Messenger?”

Jae Shin shrugged gingerly. “I just mean… you’re not really dressed.”

Yong Ha shrugged, his mouth twisting exaggeratedly into an expression of apathetic disgust, and flipped through the pages of the book he’d grabbed until he found his place. “You needed to eat something.”

“It wasn’t urgent,” Jae Shin said, shoveling another spoonful of porridge into his mouth. (All right, maybe it had been a little bit urgent. He hadn’t realized how damn hungry he was until he’d started eating.) “You could have at least gotten dressed.”

“What - and chance you sneaking a glimpse of me half naked?” Yong Ha brought a hand to his mouth, eyes wide in faux horror. “You cad. You _would_  want me to undress in front of you. I know you’re overcome with lust for me, Geol Oh, but you should really try to control yourself.”

Jae Shin choked on his mouthful of porridge, curling forward to cough rice and seaweed out of his lungs. “ _Ow,_ ” he gasped, pressing his hand over the bandages wrapped around his chest. (He had a sudden, unwelcome vision of pulsing black blood staining the cotton even as he knew that it was more likely just one giant scab by then and there was no way he had that much blood left to lose.) “That really… that really hurts. Don’t say useless things like that while I’m eating.”

When he looked up Yong Ha was staring at him, face pale, one hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay? Do I need to call the doctor again?” He pulled Jae Shin up by the shoulder, hands going for the lapels of his jeogori. “Did you pull your stitches out? I’m sorry, it was just a stupid joke, I didn’t -”

Jae Shin shrugged him off, trying to keep the wince of pain off his face as he rocked his left shoulder back. “ _Yeorim._ Stop. I’m fine. Just don’t say anything so damn stupid while I’m trying to eat, all right?” He tried to grin but knew even as his lips parted that it was a cheap one, thin, transparent, barely obscuring the undercurrent of throbbing pain in his chest where his flesh was just beginning to knit itself back together. “Besides, do you really think I couldn’t control myself? Me?”

“No,” Yong Ha said after a second. The blood was starting to come back into his face - maybe a little too much, because he seemed to go almost pink. He looked down and picked his book up again, flipping through it to find his place a second time. “Just… keep eating, idiot.”

“What, don’t you want to feed me?”

Silence. Jae Shin glanced up. Yong Ha wasn't looking at him. He was reading, head bent studiously over words that Jae Shin knew had to be something completely inappropriate, but after just a second he took a quick breath. "I hope you know that I -" Yong Ha hesitated. (He hesitated? Since when did Yeorim hesitate? Since when did _Gu Yong Ha_ hesitate?) "I hope you know that I meant it, what I said on the docks. I'll always be on your side. Just don't -"

“Just don’t what?”

“Just don’t pull that kind of stunt again. All right? Are you listening to me, Geol Oh?” Yong Ha’s mouth worked for a second. He closed his book, keeping his place with a thumb, and set it down in his lap. (It wasn’t one of his red-covered books after all; Jae Shin didn’t recognize it. Something new? Had to be; if it had been from the library he would have recognized it.) “You think I like sitting back here knowing you’re out _there,_ getting shot at and plotted against and hunted down like an animal?”

“Yong Ha -”

“I know that it’s important. I really do. There’s a reason I’ve never tried to stop you before.” He leaned forward, catching his weight on the bed mat with one hand. “But when it’s a _trap_ -”

Jae Shin reached out and laid his hand over Yong Ha’s, because he didn’t know what else he could do. Because there wasn’t anything else. “I’m sorry,” he said after a second. “I should have listened to you.”

He’d never been able to figure it out, why Gu Yong Ha had stuck with him all this time. Jae Shin had always been way too much trouble, way too dark, way too angry all the time, and Yeorim had always been - he’d always been himself, that’s all. He’d always been light and sharp and bad at physical exertion and good at paying attention and exceptionally, _exceptionally_ good at picking up women and for some reason, (even though they were polar opposites, even though Yeorim had more interesting things to do), for some reason at the end of the day Yeorim ended up finding him again even if he thought he didn’t want to be found. Especially when he thought he didn’t want to be found.

Even after all these years, if someone had asked Jae Shin wouldn’t have been able to say whether or not Yeorim actually liked him. Did he hang around him (like a shadow for the last ten years) because he really considered them friends? When Yeorim looked at him, flashed that stupid grin - was that just Yeorim looking for amusement and finding it? He seemed to change his mind about as often as he changed his clothes, changed his clothes about as often as he changed friends, changed friends like they were color-coordinated accessories that went in and out with the seasons.

Once Jae Shin had tried not talking to him for a while, had tried not seeking him out, had tried finding somewhere else private and quiet to drink that wasn’t behind Yeorim’s door, but it had lasted all of a week before he found himself outside Yong Ha’s room again - knocking on the door frame and feeling like an idiot. Why would Yeorim want to spend any time at all with him? He was… hell, he was _boring._ Never talked about anything interesting, even when he did have something to say. He was bad with alcohol and he was bad with words and he was even worse with women, and Yeorim was very very very good at all of those things and could have anything or anyone he wanted but still. Still.

The night before when Yong Ha had found him and argued with him and hit him ( _and cried,_ whispered a voice in the back of his head) the look on his face looked exactly the same way as Jae Shin had felt, ten years ago when he’d asked his older brother not to go.

Gu Yong Ha shook his head. “Story of your life,” he said. “You should always listen to me, Moon Jae Shin.” Then he looked up into Jae Shin’s face and grinned, the look in his eyes tight with concern and worry and something unreadable that Jae Shin couldn’t quite place.

“Yeah,” Jae Shin replied, breath catching in his lungs for no reason. “Probably.”


End file.
